MR. GRANVILLE-BARKER AND " DOCTOR KNOCK " [To the Editor
of the SPECTATOR.]
Sia—By blending some friendliness to me with the dozen lines' trouncing which he gives to the very distinguished French author I have translated, your reviewer makes me so uncom- fortable that he will, perhaps, forgive Inc if I take up the cudgels on behalf of Monsieur Jules Romains and his play, Knock. • • That Mr. Humbert Wolfe should not find it funny is no matter for objection ; we either see a joke or we don't. But his criticism that " unlike the farces of the Abbey Theatre " . it contains " no redeeming touch of genuine humanity "- is this not just a little insular ? The play is not only pro- jected upon the plane of satire, but, in accordance with good French tradition, is studiously kept there ; an artistic achieve- ment, which I should have thought would be as delightful to the sensitive critic as (say) decoration that is pure decor- ation, or as any other form of expression that abides within its own virtue will be.
Further : " M. Romains had the idea of improving on Moliere by substituting for one mutae imaginaire a whole community of them." Yes, the play is, I think, in a true descent from Moliere, and a very good ancestry too. But where he concentrated his satire on the patient and left his doctors pretentious fools, M. Romains concentrates on the doctoi and makes him a very clever fellow indeed. And in that most significant difference lies the point of the modern play.
" Isn't all this perhaps done just a little more for the benefit of the doctor than the patient ? " asks the late tenant of the practice when he comes back to find the whole town under treatment.
" Doctor Parpalaid," replies Knock, " I think you forget there is a higher cause to be served than either . . . the cause of medical ' science."
As a famous French surgeon, who with the rest of Paris had chuckled over the play, remarked to me : " This fellow is a punish., of course. But every doctor is a Knock ' at heart—and so he should be ! "
I refuse to suspect Mr. Humbert Wolfe of that grosser insularity of supposing that a serious subject must never be touched on lightly, and that a truth, made amusing, becomes negligible. To which appalling theory French literary genius is, indeed, a standing contradiction.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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